Despite Size, Conservative Party Is a Force to Reckon With

By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA

Published: December 13, 1999

Michael L. Long, a man of obvious intelligence and energy, did not finish the 12th grade at Richmond Hill High School in Queens. Instead, a few months from graduation in 1959, he joined the Marines.

''I just was that kind of a kid,'' Mr. Long recalled with a throaty laugh, shaking his head. ''There were times when they were talking about throwing me out of school. And then I wound up on the honor roll. And then after I did that, I decided to leave and go to the Marine Corps. I was just contrary. So I guess I've been contrary all my life.''

The same must be said of the Conservative Party, headed by Mr. Long. It was conceived in reaction to New York's liberal brand of Republicanism, nurtured by the unfashionably resolute and erudite conservatism of William F. Buckley Jr., raised on a series of long-shot campaigns, and toughened, in those early years, by a political atmosphere that was downright hostile to it.

The Conservative Party, which exists only in New York, has acted as the defiant, doctrinaire little brother to its more malleable sibling, the Republican Party. The two have grown cozier in the last generation as the Conservatives have succeeded in their original aim of drawing the Republicans rightward, yet Mr. Long and company still tend to view the Republican Party as insufficiently pure on issues like smaller government and opposition to abortion. And, remarkably, they remain willing to tell the Republicans to take a hike, even when the stakes are enormous.

That tension is more evident than ever now, as the Conservative Party weighs whether to back Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, in his expected race next year against Hillary Rodham Clinton for the United States Senate. Mr. Long insists that in return for his party's support, the mayor must forgo the backing of the Liberal Party, a source of succor throughout his political career, and switch positions to oppose a form of late-term abortion.

Mr. Long has something Mr. Giuliani needs, control of the Conservative ballot line -- no Republican has won a statewide race without it since 1974 -- and that puts Mr. Long in a powerful position. If the mayor accepts his terms, the Conservatives will have forced an important Republican to mold himself to their liking. If not, Mr. Long says, his party will run its own candidate, taking votes on the right away from the mayor, even if that might mean handing the contest to Mrs. Clinton. It is a potent threat, one that reminds every Republican moderate of the cost of crossing the Conservatives.

There are just 172,000 registered Conservatives, 1.6 percent of the state's voters, but the party's appeal to conservative Republicans and independents, and its ability to play the spoiler, make it a far greater force than those numbers suggest. In recent years, it has drawn 200,000 to 800,000 votes on its own line in statewide elections. That could be enough to sway a Senate race in which about six million votes will be cast.

''I don't think it was ever the vision that the Conservative Party would overtake the Republican party,'' Mr. Long said. ''We've always understood that the Conservative Party is a philosophical movement more than a political party.'' And unlike an ordinary political party, it can stomach moves that might aid its traditional opponents, the Democrats.

That willingness to undermine to Republicans is what gives the Conservatives their power, forcing the Republicans to court them. It is a threat that has been the core of the party's strategy since its creation.

In the early 1960's, Republicans dominated politics in the state, but an ideological conservative had no political home here. The state's top Republicans -- Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Senator Jacob K. Javits, Senator Kenneth B. Keating, Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz -- were moderate to liberal. Republicans sometimes competed with Democrats for the Liberal Party line.

So in early 1962, J. Daniel Mahoney and Kieran E. O'Doherty -- Wall Street lawyers, brothers-in-law, and alienated conservatives -- invented the Conservative Party as a counterweight to the Liberals.

''The intellectual wellspring from which it came was Bill Buckley and National Review,'' his magazine, said Kieran V. Mahoney, a Republican political consultant who is the son of Daniel Mahoney. ''The agenda was anti-communism, tough on drugs and welfare, limited government.''

The early leaders of the party were an unusually intellectual bunch for pols, starting with Mr. Buckley. Three of them -- Henry and Anne A. Paolucci, and Charles Rice -- were college professors, as was Paul L. Adams, the party's two-time nominee for governor. Daniel Mahoney later became a federal appeals court judge.

They were unusual in another way, as well. Across the country, ''movement conservatives'' have tended to be Protestant. But nearly all the early Conservative Party leaders were Roman Catholic, particularly downstate, where the party was strongest. Mr. Long said many of the founders admired Senator Joseph McCarthy, another Catholic conservative who felt abandoned by the Republican Party.

''These were guys who were aghast at Vatican II,'' Kieran Mahoney said. ''The Republicans in New York City had a kind of wealthy-class, Protestant-elite stigma attached to them. Between that and the liberalism of the Rockefeller Republicans, these conservative Catholics just weren't comfortable as Republicans. I would guess the Conservative Party is still more heavily Catholic than either of the major parties.''

In 1965, the Conservative Party nominated Mr. Buckley for mayor of New York City, and he drew more than 300,000 votes, 13 percent of the total, in a three-way race won by Representative John V. Lindsay, a liberal Republican. It was a watershed campaign for the Conservatives, who gained heavy publicity and proved their strength in the overwhelmingly Democratic city.

The Conservatives suddenly seemed a real force, and they were vilified by the other parties and the news media. The party's opposition to welfare programs and forced school busing was frequently portrayed as racist. ''People spit on us when we went around with petitions,'' said Serphin R. Maltese, a party founder, later party chairman, who now is a Republican state senator from Queens. ''We had things thrown at us; we were called racist, reactionary, sexist.''

Though Mr. Rockefeller tried hard to kill the new party -- he pressured Republicans not to accept Conservative support -- its following grew, presaging the national shift rightward over the next generation. The party's support came mainly from those who would later be called Reagan Democrats -- working-class, urban and suburban, often Catholic.

It reached its high-water mark in 1970, when James L. Buckley, brother of William, won election to the Senate in a tight three-way race. He remains the only Conservative candidate ever to win a statewide race without the Republican line.

The Conservatives began working more closely with the Republicans in the 1970's, making a gradual transition from antagonists to mercurial allies. The Conservatives found they could sway Republican nominations by taking sides in primaries, as they did in 1980, helping Alfonse M. D'Amato unseat Mr. Javits. With that victory, the last of the major liberal Republicans were gone, and Mr. D'Amato, Conservative ally and opponent of abortion rights, was New York's most powerful Republican.

Since then, most Republican candidates for state and local offices have had Conservative Party support. In last year's legislative races, 131 Republican candidates had the Conservative line, too; only 11 Democrats did.

Since Mr. Long, 59, a former community school board and City Council member, became chairman in 1988, the party has been very much his show. From the cramped state headquarters in a walk-up above a storefront in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, chosen for its proximity to his liquor store, he rules the party with the gruff, gabby charm of the Irish and Italian immigrants he grew up around. He is direct about his aims and his threats, and has the equanimity needed by a father of nine children.

In short, he is liked by Republicans and Conservatives alike. But he is also feared. Mr. Long pressures Republican candidates to oppose abortion, gay rights and casino gambling, threatening to run Conservative opponents or, in some cases, give his party's line to Democrats. ''People in my party are afraid to cross him,'' said a Republican legislator.

Like his predecessors, Mr. Long has been willing to play havoc with his Republican partners. And he has shown a particular reluctance to embrace Mr. Giuliani, a vocal supporter of abortion rights, who had the city formally recognize same-sex domestic partnerships, who endorsed Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in 1994, and who proposed a casino on Governors Island.

The Conservatives ran their own candidates for mayor of New York City in 1989 and 1993, rather than support Mr. Giuliani, though he was locked in tight races both times against David N. Dinkins. When Mr. Giuliani ran for re-election in 1997, the nearest Mr. Long would go toward supporting him was to leave the Conservative line blank, and he notes, pointedly, ''I didn't vote.''

In 1990, the Conservative Party rejected the Republicans' choice for governor, Pierre A. Rinfret, and instead nominated Herbert London, who attacked Mr. Rinfret as aggressively as he did Mr. Cuomo. Mr. London collected more than 800,000 votes, 20 percent of the total, nearly outpolling Mr. Rinfret.

''That was a little scary,'' Mr. Long said. If Mr. London had finished second, ''There would have been an infusion of people changing their registration, and you would have seen other players trying to take over the party. It would have become totally a political party and lost its vision.''

In other words, David does not really want to kill Goliath, he just wants to tell Goliath how to behave.

The 1994 race for governor changed life for the Conservatives. They backed Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, but had to bend farther than ever to make the endorsement. The party embraced his proposals for lower taxes and tougher criminal penalties, and overlooked his support for gay rights and abortion rights -- though Mr. Pataki sides with Mr. Long in supporting a ban on a method of late-term abortion that opponents call partial-birth abortion.

Mr. Pataki drew more than 300,000 votes on the Conservative line, double his slender winning margin over Mr. Cuomo. It was the first time the Conservatives had nominated a winner for governor, giving it a greater voice than ever in Albany, and access to a vast patronage pool.

Mr. Pataki appointed George J. Marlin, a Conservative, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and named Mrs. Paolucci chairwoman of the City University of New York. Eileen Long, Mr. Long's daughter, is chief of staff to Lt. Gov. Mary O. Donohue. At Mr. Long's urging, the governor named Paul Atanasio, an old protege of his, to the School Construction Authority Board. (The latter proved embarrassing; Mr. Atanasio put another person with ties to the Conservative Party in charge of a project, where inadequate safety measures later caused the death of a girl.)

So it appears Mr. Long has more than ever to lose by bucking the Republican Party. But maybe not. The consensus among Republicans is that Mr. Pataki would be unwilling to break with the Conservatives over their refusal to support Mr. Giuliani -- a trade that, for the governor, would mean losing a powerful ally for the sake of a mayor with whom he has brittle relations.

Mr. Long insists that no amount of pressure from any quarter will force his party to support a candidate. In recent years, he has made late-term abortion such a defining issue for the party that if he compromised on it, he says, he would not be able ''to go to sleep at night or look myself in the mirror.''

Judith Hope, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, said: ''There's something almost refreshing about it, though I profoundly disagree with him. It's rare to see what appears to be a principled stand from a party.''

Mr. Long agrees with Republican leaders that Mr. Giuliani would be the strongest opponent for Mrs. Clinton. ''I don't contest that, and I don't contest the fact that he's done a wonderful job as mayor,'' he said.

But, Mr. Long added: ''I think the mayor has lately become a convenient conservative. If I'm going to support a convenient conservative, who has been quite liberal on a lot of issues, I want to announce to the world if we do endorse him, that we know what we're endorsing, but we have the following commitments from him. We're not about just winning elections.''

Photo: Michael L. Long, chairman of the Conservative Party in New York. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)(pg. B6)